Shattered Wig Press, publisher of The Shattered Wig Review and many fine books of poetry and prose, has been going down the rabbit hole of culture since 1988. We are based in Baltimore, Maryland, home of Poe, Billie Holiday, John Waters, David Simon, murder, pavement surrealism and liberationist absurdity.
We are always looking to publish the gritty, mischievous, magically absurd, brutally poignant or simply put miraculous communication.

Shattered Wig #28

Coming In November!

Monday, August 16, 2010

House Buys

In the arcane and eldritch profession of book and record buying, the art of "doing a house buy" is both a staple of fueling the stock with treasures and a psychological immersion ceremony. People, some who have maybe never seen you before in their lives, admit you into their homes to peruse their valued possessions. Often these people are at crossroads or turning points in their lives. A loved one has died, they're moving, they're splitting up a home due to divorce, or maybe they are convinced their eyes have become possessed with the spirit of Bluebeard and once they sell all their reading materials they are going to have them yanked out by Bill on the corner who has some pliers and a mechanic's license.

But no matter what the situation is, it becomes an intimate moment between mortal humans and usually stories are traded about crucial personal history. The book buyer, even one as lowdown and hated as myself, becomes a bartender without booze or a priest without religion other than the printed word.

The scariest and most haunting house buy I ever did was one of my first. I was working at Second Story Books in Bethesda and the very knowledgable, but perhaps at the time a bit grousy main buyer was either consciously or unconsciously trying to clear the deck of all the shiftless hippies working there. He was either attempting this with me, or letting me earn my stripes or perhaps just plain dodging a bullet, when he sent me out - a green rookie of maybe two weeks bookstore experience - to a ramshackle house in Virginia to look at some books a family had. But when I eventually made it there, this being pre-Map Quest and GPS and me being map illiterate, the family was more along the lines of the Family Manson or Leatherface and his bloods.

The house was huge and falling apart and almost without light. Each of the honeycomb rooms had someone either sleeping (at 3pm) or lounging on a ratty bed looking confused or just lethargic as a toothless 20 year old cat.

The five or six books they had were arranged on a picnic table outside spine up.

"We thought you'd be older and wearing a suit, being all into books and things," the one who was apparently in his 60s or so, but still leaking an air of danger while also being the healthiest looking of the lot said. There were about four others standing around me and the table. A couple in their thirties who had jailhouse hand done tattoos and a feral looking tyke somewhere between 12 and 100. "Well, the oldest guy was real busy and he sent me out, but I'm sorry to say we can't use these." There was an incredibly long period of silence after this as if a coffin had just been lowered into a grave containing everyone's favorite relative. All eyes were transfixed by the five or six books. I sadly can't remember exactly what they were anymore, this being 1982 at the time, whether they were book club or Time Life or outdated textbooks.

"So could you drop me at my parole officer's?" the one guy somewhere in his thirties asked.

His breaking the silence, even if it was to suggest a further trip down into the rabbithole of questionable employment, was a relief and my positive answer came out almost with great excitement. I turned down many offers of various chemicals from him as I delivered him to his appointment and then with a great rush of freedom and elation promptly got lost for hours in the Virginia/DC maelstrom which was so fond of chewing me up.

The main buyer looked almost surprised to see me return.

One buy that I luckily missed out on turned out to be the books of my dead high school english teacher, much beloved, who had brutally spiralled downward in the five years after my classe's graduation.

Often, more often than not, the degree of funk found on house buys is wildly disproportionate to what you'd expect from the person and their bearing. One gent who we were fond of calling "The Dancer" because he carried himself with such aplomb and was always dashing about in Edward Gorey-length scarves and crisp slacks and sweaters that looked so new they could cut you, lived in what basically amounted to a Cottage of Mold. A green cardigan grew along the lower outside walls and when my strong young helper The Bow-Legged Gorilla sat down at one point to rest his eyes immediately puffed out like a Famous Monsters of Filmland still. And on that buy I found not one, but two used pairs of tighty whiteys draped over cd piles and lodged between record jackets.

And brothers and sisters, you who know me, know I am no stranger to the funk. Some of the more mean spirited may say I have lived among the foulest funk. The last days of the glorious House of Wigs featured an unworking toilet and a blackened bathtub. But I have to say, most house buys make me feel just a little bit better about my personal hygiene.

Today I had a pleasant house buy that got me thinking about the long history of house buys in my past. An acquaintance from the durable Baltimore arts world with great stories of an artistic family and of poets that I admire. All kinds of shadowy corners full of mysterious cabinets. And a friendly cat with a tiny head. Two humans going about survival and trading tidbits about what they have gathered along the way.

Upcoming Mole Suit Choir Shows

Out Now From Fell Swoop!

Mattress In Alley, Raft Upon The Sea

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Long Live Blaster Al Ackerman

Astrally Reassigned March 17, 2013

Raymond Chandler As Martian

The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit Going Into Third Printing

My mutant baby walks again! 52 pages. "I have read The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit by Rupert Wondolowski. It is as good as the title would mandate being to warrant having such a bad ass title on the cover. The poems here are amazing and weird and funny, and for $9 you can’t really ask for much more. Get this quick.." - Blake Butler, HTML Giant

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Reviews

The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit - by Rupert Wondolowski
"HTML Giant Reviews Mole Suit!
My sparkling new baby has its first review, before the publication party even. My noose lays damp on my book covered bed and for that I hail Adam Robinson and Publishing Genius Press.
New from PGP: The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit
Posted by Blake Butler @ 2:28 am on December 16th, 2008 (Permalink)
I have read The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit by Rupert Wondolowski. It is as good as the title would mandate being to warrant having such a bad ass title on the cover. The poems here are amazing and weird and funny, and for $9 you can't really ask for much more. Get this quick." - Blake Butler/HTML Giant

Normal's Gold Plated Night At The Golden West

Nathan Bell, Michael Lambright & Justin Being Suave

Chris Toll Resonating At Wig 28 Party

Shattered Wig Review #28 Is Out!

After a two year love hiatus, Shattered Wig is back with an effulgent 66 page issue bursting with brilliant writing by folks like Stephanie Barber, Chris Toll, Amelia Gray, Michael Kimball, Adam Robinson, Blaster Al Ackerman and John Colburn and edgy "Slancys" by Professor Derrick Buisch. The full color cover by Rocco Randy George McWilliams Superfly III is worth the $6 price alone. Contact us here for a copy or buy one in person at Normal's Books & Records, Atomic Books or Minas. $12 will get you a two issue subscription shipped to your door.

"Don’t let the DIY look of the publication mislead you. Here, you’ll find sophisticated literature, with allusions to the visual poets, surrealist, automatic writing and stunning poetic lines like Stephanie Barber’s “one conducts electricity or symphonies, big bands or / trains or themselves with restraint.” There is plenty of worthwhile reading material in here all for only six dollars." - What Weekly

Shattered Wig Review #28 - $8 ppd

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Chris Mason of the Tinklers

The Elements by The Tinklers

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Corn & Smoke by Blaster Al Ackerman

Corn and Smoke: Stories, Performances, Things by Blaster Al Ackerman 88 Pages, perfect bound, $12 postage paid from: Shattered Wig Press 425 E. 31st St. Baltimore, Md. 21218 Al Ackerman is the Mark Twain of the 21st Century, with a strong dose of Phil Dickian time warp and a heavy reading of every sci-fi pulp of the 40s and 50s ever printed. Not to mention the wry wit of a Perelman. Ackerman is serious about language and presenting the myriad onion layers of the universe, but he chooses for his subject the margin dwellers, the avatars, all the while with great empathy for the lost souls of The New Age. This collection brings together some of his out of print classic stories like "What My Bible Did For Me" and "The Crab" with new brain teasers like "The John Eaton Recommendations" ("little gauzy winged things fascinated him") and "Ten Finger Earl".

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Baltimore Magazine Award

Best Literary Magazine 2009

Shattered Wig Review #27

This issue boasts front and back covers by Baltimore's recent MICA graduate who has gone super nova in the last year or so - Erin Womack. Seemingly possessed by Star Wars, Weird Old Ladies With Mysterious Crystals and Persian Folktales that don't exist, Erin's art has been popping up everywhere in multiple mediums - children's books, cassettes, DVDs, storefront windows, shirts, hand printed posters, paintings, drawings. Other young Baltimore upstarts included are the poets Lauren Bender, Justin "Wifehair" Sirois, Jamie Gaughan-Perez, M. Magnus (from Alexandria, VA, actually, but he sure spends a lot of time in Baltimore), Stephanie Barber and Adam Robinson. For us they write in the sweet stew of language that blends post-surrealism, eternal absurdity, pathos despite itself and echoes of the ever looming LANGUAGE. 27 is also chock full of most of the damaged geniuses you've grown to love or despise: Mok Hossfeld, Blaster Al Ackerman, John M. Bennett, Eerie Billy Haddock and Andrew Goldfarb. And I defy anyone to not love the poems of John Colburn. His "Human Being In Celestial Mode" is the one thing that gave me hope in the new year. All that plus feverish cartoons, collages and drawings.

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The Whispering of Ice Cubes by Rupert Wondolowski

52 pages perfect bound. Prose and poetry by the editor of The Shattered Wig Review. $8 postage paid. "Rupert Wondolowski's gritty work is macabre, mischievous, playful, and irreverent, approximating a fusion of William Kotzwinkle, Ron Padgett (circa Great Balls of Fire), Richard Brautigan, and Charles Bukowski. These 39 pieces are delivered with the power and polish of French surrealism, and yet they are particularly American in nature, informed by a sort of seamy-underside-of-society perspective, presumably influenced by Wondolowski's residence in Baltimore, Maryland, stomping ground of two other great American surrealists, John Waters and Edgar Allan Poe. This is not some dour, pretentious art-for-art's-sake surrealism, nor is it some tepid experimental workshop riffing, but rather the work of a highly accomplished and unique writer with a twisted sense of humor." - Mark Terrill in Rain Taxi

About Me

Author of The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit, The Whispering of Ice Cubes, Humans Go Outside to Hurt You, Shiny Pencils, The Incredible Sleeping Man and Nightmare Rubber. Editor of The Shattered Wig Review and Press.